Oomph as Virgin Media UK Kills VIVID Ultrafast Broadband Brand UPDATE
A small development this morning as cable ISP Virgin Media has decided to replace the “VIVID” branding on their ultrafast broadband packages. Instead future packages will adopt the letter ‘M’ (assumed to denote Megabits) and their top tier 516Mbps triple-play bundle will be renamed from “V.VIP” to “Ultimate Oomph.”
Admittedly ultimate oomph does rather sound like how I felt right after falling down the stairs recently (it was just one of those days) but I can see where they’re going with it. Meanwhile their other broadband packages will go from, for example, “VIVID 50 Broadband and Phone” to “M50 Fibre Broadband + Phone.” We note the return of “Fibre” in the new titles, which might have something to do with Cityfibre’s recent court loss (here).
Meanwhile their other “Player TV” and “Full House TV” triple-play bundles are being rebranded to “Big” and “Bigger Bundles” respectively. This at least makes more generic sense than the old one. As a side note we believe that the “Ultimate Oomph” package will also be getting the same technical support feature as their Homework’s plan added on for free (i.e. priority next day engineer appointment to help get their connection back up and running as quickly as possible).
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UPDATE 9:51am
As part of the above change Virgin will give customers with combined broadband and mobile bundles unlimited 4G mobile data – available for seven days – if they experience an issue with their service that results in a loss of broadband connectivity.
Customers can speak to a dedicated team to access the unlimited data and book a next-day engineer appointment by calling either 150 or 789 from a Virgin Media home phone or a Virgin Mobile SIM respectively. The service is available to both new and existing customers signed up to Virgin Media’s combined broadband and mobile bundles which launched at the end of April.
Jeff Dodds, Managing Director of Virgin Media, said:
“We know how important it is for our customers to stay connected and that’s why Virgin Media’s new service promise offers peace of mind, no matter what happens.
It’s a simple, transparent and straight-up commitment to our customers that we’ll keep them online with superfast unlimited 4G mobile data if they experience an issue with their broadband, plus they have the option of a next-day engineer appointment to get things fixed.
Our service promise is at the heart of our un-limiting Oomph bundle line-up which offers our customers an unrivalled connected entertainment experience in and out of the home – at great value.”
One bonus of adding a mobile plan to your broadband package (click the ‘Oomph’ button on their website) is that you’ll also benefit from a faster broadband speed. So by taking a mobile SIM (2GB, 5GB, 15GB, 50GB or Truly Unlimited data, texts and calls) average broadband speeds offered in these bundles increase from 50Mbps to 100Mbps, 100Mbps to 200Mbps and from 200Mbps to 350Mbps. Customers also have the freedom to change their mobile data allowance each month.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I bet many people have ultimate oomph when dealing with the customer service department in Pakistan.
That’s why you don’t ring customer services, you ring retentions and you’re always put through to someone in Britain.
I’m with TalkTalk and made multiple phone calls to their Indian call centre to try and get a broken router replaced. The router wouldn’t turn on but they insisted it was a line fault and I needed an OR engineer who would charge me £150 if it was my equipment!
I only had about 5 months left in contract so was gonna cancel and pay the late fee which would have been about £55. I went through retentions and the guy I got was British and he gave me 3 months of free Internet as compensation, upgraded me to the new WiFi hub and dropped me from £32 a month down to £19.95 a month for the 80/20 service. This was whilst still in contract as well!
Always, ALWAYS go through cancellations if you want any sort of shot at having your problem resolved!
Customer services is in Indoa actually
Hi I’m replying to Mark’s comment here.Brilliant strategy which actually works well with other companies if you catch them when they are having a drive to retain existing customers. I have been given excellent deals with Vodaphone for example but you have to catch them just at the right time and if you dont get a good deal call back in a few weeks.
@Mark Regardless of ringing cancellations you will still be put through to somebody outside of Britain. I had this recently when canceling an order from Virgin media back in March this year. With other providers like BT and sky it’s different on occasion But with Virgin media they will make it as difficult as possible for anyone wanting to cancel their services.
If you go through to cancellations, and get put through to customer service by them, you will get a UK call centre. I was told this by virgin staff themselves
No doubt this will be accompanied by an increase in prices mid-contract…
I’d love to know what drugs the people who came up with this were using.
Geeza marketing doesn’t exactly have a history of working well with premium products.
I think the drug is called liberalism, courtesy of your local university.
I’m fairly confident neither liberalism or politics of any kind is related to this rather weird choice of marketing. Can we keep this politics free? Nothing in the story in any way related to it?
Hey Mike,
I’ve been suffering from withdrawals lately after I stopped taking liberalism cold turkey. I went to my local University and their supply is bone dry. You know where else I can go? I feel nothing anymore. Just the empty void of nothingness. The darkness is closing in on me. Save me Mike. Save me.
Wonga loans is a good example. Must have been a slow day of brainstorming at VM
VM obviously don’t intend on relying on word of mouth to spread their message, because there is no way I’d discuss the idea of switching to the Virgin Ultimate Oomph package with anyone, especially my nearest and dearest.
I’m guessing it will get regularly throttled, so they can call it the Virgin Ultimate Slow Oomph Package and people like Matt Hancock will think VM has signed up to providing a VM 10Mbps USO.
No throttling at all those days are gone.I have been with virgin nearly a decade and have had a few problems same as anyone else overall I’m very happy in fact incredibly happy with the utterly fantastic speed currently 350 mbps and no that’s no typo smooth as a babys ass.
No stated throttling, although it still occurs. When I was with them I spent about 40 hours trying to replicate scenarios where the throttling occurs but I couldn’t pin it down. At one point it seemed as though it was peak time throttling for traffic going into London but it was worse than that.
It seems the throttling is in relation to single ip / socket speeds, because if you use multiple sockets / different ips [i.e. multiple vpns round robin load balancing] you could get the full speeds.
It was a lot of hassle, and its really hard to figure this stuff out. Ringing customer service will result in nothing more than ‘how many light light on cabal modum’ ‘is it flash green or soiled green sir’.
I’m with BT right now but I might give VM another shot when the contract is up, but usually it results in a lesson in frustration.
There’s a big difference between congestion and throttling.
What you describe sounds very much like peak time congestion and slow single thread throughput.
That doesn’t mean they are throttling connections.
Pity it is still 35mpbs upstream, even for top tier… still a dealbreaker for me to come off BT (i do lots of cloud backup)
Bullshido… Cloud backups my bottom.
Don’t lie, no need to lie.
Well done on calling him out guys.
@HansJonno, @AvatarHervé, @AvatarArchie
Really children, no need to troll, pathetic individuals
Cloud backups aren’t unrealistic — the price of 1TB is reasonably cheap nowadays that I’d be tempted to go even “Cloud NAS” if I had a more symmetric internet connectioon.
@Jedster
I’m not seeing why the comment isn’t realistic. Cloud backup needs bandwidth and low latency.
Even if you have a NAS – say Synology – they offer their own cloud backup offering for the NAS. That does require decent bandwidth to run a snapshot.
It crawls on an 80/20 is reasonable on a 300/50 and flies on an 850/850
@A_BUILDER
My response was to the three prior childish comments to my original comment.
I fully agree. I have 330/50 now so going down to 35 would be a backward step..I need high upload speed to get picture and video to 2x cloud backup sites.. and when it slow it takes ages
VM haven’t bothered to cable the side of the street I live on since I moved here about ten years ago. But they’ve cabled 65%+ of the adjacent town recently in FO (the rest is coaxial courtesy of Cabletel, back in the day).
Not that I actually miss being STM’d 🙂
All this rebranding seems like obfuscation to confuse and bewilder the existing customer and eventually make them pay more for less.
If it’s supposed to catch your eye it does.
All I see is:
0 mph.
Virgin media need to offer their 10gbps broadband without these additional pesky bundles of junk no one needs tv
i have tried upgrading to the Ultimate oomph package
as an existing customer ” over 15 years ” you have to buy the second tv box at £99 ” £49 for new customer” plus a £25 connection charge,
If you complain they will give you the connection for free but still require the £99 for the box ” this is a not your box you cannot sell it and is not a deposit ”
I have complained via social media and the official complaints page ” im 10 days into a 28 day response Sla ”
I feel that existing customer are being pushed to one side to bring on new customers so much so i’m thinking about cancelling it all
I agree with steve been a existing customer for 24 years ex cable corporation and telewest. Offer of £99 per month is only for new customers. Existing customers who have been loyal have to pay £139 per month.
The only thing I am thinking is giving it an my own oomph by leaving. A
Also by making customers pay £5 for the kid package Extra and removing from the orginal Full House tv package now is appalling.
Gaurav
Not true, called virgin yesterday and I’m getting the full ultimate oomph package for 99 a month. I’ve been a virgin customer for 17 years, never had a problem. Spoke to a lovely guy in the belshill call centre and he set it up for me no problem.